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In a year that saw several valiant attempts at clarifying the gloomy science of economics, Robert L. Heilbroner scored a popular triumph in The Worldly Philosophers. He made the ordinarily dusty trip from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to John Keynes as clear and straight as anyone who ever took up the thankless job. Another popularizer, and a very practiced old hand at the game. Will Durant, showed up with The Renaissance, the fifth fat volume of his story of civilization. As usual, Author Will brought down upon himself the buts and ifs of scholars, but did the period up in a sprightly fashion that his critics must secretly envy.
There was a falling-off of books on World War II, at least of useful ones, but a few were important and and a a handful readable. Sir Winston Churchill wound up his great six-volume history of the war with Triumph and Tragedy, which carried events from the Normandy beaches to final victory, and ended with Churchill's defeat in 1945 at the hands of Labor. With New Guinea and the Marianas, Harvard's Samuel Eliot Morison completed the eighth volume (six more to come) of his U.S. naval history of the war, a job second in scope and flair only to Churchill's own. And from the U.S. Army came Louis Morton's The Fall of the Philippines, Volume 19 of its projected 87-volume official history, and one of the best so far. From the enemy side came documents of such varying value as Ciano's Hidden Diary, Franz von Papen's Memoirs, The Rommel Papers and Hitler's Secret Conversations, a collection of curious drivel that must have the remnants of his followers wondering how they could have swallowed similar stuff.
The normally busy Lincoln and Civil War branches of the publishing industry almost ground to a halt, but two fine items more than saved the day for the specialists. One was nothing less than The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln in eight bulging volumes, which brought to a close a 29-year job of loving scholarship by the Abraham Lincoln Association. The other was A Stillness at Appomattox, the last of three lively volumes detailing the history of the Army of the Potomac. It was the job of a journalist, Bruce Catton, but no scholar had done it nearly so well.
Readers of biography and autobiography had the most interesting time of it, month in, month out. To be sure, the year's first big guns fired blanks. Carl Sandburg was curiously flat in Always the Young Strangers, a long reminiscence of his own youth, and Scholar Edgar Johnson was thorough but wooden in his Charles Dickens. But there were better things to come. One was an excellent first volume of a definitive biography of Sigmund Freud by a distinguished British disciple, Dr. Ernest Jones. Biographer Andre Maurois published his best book, Leila, about man-eating French Novelist George Sand. In The Traitor and the Spy, James Thomas Flexner took a careful historical look at Benedict Arnold and Major John Andre in a book rich in excitement and scholarship. Irving Brant finished the fourth volume of his massive James Madison, which may yet (one more volume to come) turn out to be one of the most distinguished U.S. biographies ever written.